Book Shelf

The underlying theme that Wall Street’s Federal regulators have become whores for the industry permeates most of the well-researched books that have been written about Wall Street over the past decade. But no book has connected the dots to the nuances and subtleties of how this whoring works as effectively as Noncompliant: A Lone Whistleblower Exposes the Giants of Wall Street. Written by Carmen Segarra, the petite lawyer turned bank examiner turned whistleblower turned one-woman swat team, the 340-page tome takes the reader along on her gut-wrenching workdays for an entire seven months inside one of the most powerful and corrupted watchdogs of the powerful and corrupted players on Wall Street – the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Read our full review here.

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InBirth Strike: The Hidden Fight Over Women’s Work, Jenny Brown performs a brilliant forensic examination of the money and people behind the stealth agenda to raise the low birth rate in the United States. That agenda includes concerted campaigns against abortion, the “morning-after pill” and other forms of contraception. Using exhaustive research, Brown convincingly makes the case that it’s a well-financed corporate agenda implanted in Washington with an end goal of putting more American women in the maternity ward.

It’s not a cultural or religious agenda as many people believe. It’s just about money – corporate profits to be more specific. More babies mean more workers and more workers mean cheaper labor because there is no shortage of supply and thus no bargaining power for higher wages. (In that respect, it’s akin to why corporations spent decades undermining the right to unionize. Without a union, the individual worker has little negotiating power for higher wages, benefits or a shorter work week.) Read our full review here.

There are key sections in the book on how to find the people who can help you, how to write a solid business plan, financial statement and projections, and a compelling pitch. Equally important for the unsophisticated but creative entrepreneur, the book offers sound advice on hiring a lawyer to evaluate the deal’s terms and when to say no and walk away from potential outside investors. Read our full review here.

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Collusion by Nomi Prins not only proves that the 1 percent got bailed out while the 99 percent got sold out as a result of policies of the U.S. Central Bank (the Fed) during and after the financial crash of 2008, but it makes the powerful argument that another epic financial crash is inevitable under the current mega bank structure which has turned the Federal Reserve into little more than a money pimp (our term) for the Wall Street casino.

Prins writes that “Eight years after the crisis began, the Big Six US banks – JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup, Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs, and Morgan Stanley – collectively held 43 percent more deposits, 84 percent more assets, and triple the amount of cash they held before. The Fed has allowed the biggest banks on Wall Street to essentially double the risk that devastated the system in 2008.” Read our full review here.

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A step-by-step guide has been published on how to defeat the new-age robber barons, the corporate structure that made them billionaires while leaving workers with crumbs, and the enshrined political system that marches to the crack of their unaccountable whip.

Released by Cambridge University Press on August 31, the book is titled “A Manifesto for Social Progress: Ideas for a Better Society,” by Marc Fleurbaey, Professor in Economics and Humanistic Studies at Princeton University and a prolific social justice author. Reading the book feels like finding a large flashlight after endless days of stumbling around in a dark cave. Read our full review here.

Two interesting things happened this week in Jamie Dimon’s world: two gutsy attorneys, Helen Davis Chaitman and Lance Gotthoffer, published a book comparing JPMorgan Chase to the Gambino crime family, explaining how the bank could and should be prosecuted under RICO statutes for serial frauds against the investing public. Taking a diametrically different tack, Bloomberg Markets magazine editor, Joel Weber, fawned over Dimon in a Bloomberg TV interview, repeatedly asserting that Jamie Dimon is all about the customer…Unfortunately for Dimon, attorneys Chaitman and Gotthoffer have no such lapse of memory. In their newly published book, JPMadoff: The Unholy Alliance between America’s Biggest Bank and America’s Biggest Crook, they provide a rap sheet of exactly how JPMorgan has been “taking care” of its customers under Dimon’s oversight. Read the rest of our article here.

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Landing in the midst of the most critical election season since the New Deal era of the 30s, comes a masterpiece of labor history and political strategy from the prolific author, Robert W. McChesney, and John Nichols, the popular national affairs correspondent at The Nation. Both McChesney and Nichols are co-founders of Free Press, a national media reform organization. People Get Ready: The Fight Against a Jobless Economy and a Citizenless Democracyprovides the reader with, first, an exquisite understanding of how the U.S. evolved into a society where the citizen has been kicked to the curb in their “democracy” and, next, a strategic road map for a peaceful revolution. The authors write that “The United States retains the façade of democracy. It remains a democracy on paper and in our hearts. But ours is, increasingly, a citizenless democracy…Oligarchs and their servants call the shots for the feudal serfs of corporate capital.” Read the rest of our review here.

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Fixers: At Wall Street On Parade we call it continuity government. Michael M. Thomas, in a new book of quasi-fiction, calls it Fixers, the idea that no matter who comes and goes in the Oval Office, Wall Street has a fix in to make sure it is protected. The Thomas book could not come at a more inconvenient time for outgoing President Obama and the next leg of the continuity government that Wall Street hopes to install in the White House – otherwise known as Hillary Clinton. Read the rest of our review here.

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In his book, Other People’s Money: The Real Business of Finance, economist John Kay demonstrates not only a sagacious understanding of the grotesque underpinnings of financial markets but he maps out a series of common sense, structural reforms to bring the financial industry back to its key mandates: efficient allocation of capital and honest handling of other people’s money. From beginning to end, Kay peels back the crass hypocrisy of the market overseers, writing that much of what the financial sector does “contributes little, if anything, to the betterment of lives and the efficiency of business. And yet many things that finance could do to advance these social and economic goals are not done well – or in some cases at all.” Read our full review here.

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Killing the Host, by economist and financial writer Michael Hudson, hones an exquisitely gripping journey from Wall Street’s original role as capital allocator to its present-day parasitism that has replaced U.S. capitalism as an entrenched, politically-enforced economic model across America. This book is a must-read for anyone hoping to escape the most corrupt era in American history with a shirt still on his parasite-riddled back. Read our full review here.

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“All the Presidents’ Bankers: The Hidden Alliances that Drive American Power” by former Wall Street veteran, Nomi Prins, is a seminal addition to the history of continuity government between the White House and Wall Street from the days of Teddy Roosevelt and the Panic of 1907 right up through the Panic of 2008 and the Presidency of Barack Obama. (Don’t be intimidated by the 69 pages of footnotes; while meticulously researched, this is a captivating read for anyone seeking clarity on why Wall Street can collapse, get bailed out by the taxpayer, cause a Great Recession and still call the shots in Washington.) Read the rest of the review here.

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Paul Craig Roberts is one of the most prolific economic writers in America today. As a former Wall Street Journal editor and former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury, Roberts is a walking encyclopedia on monetary policy, economic theory and Wall Street history. After publication in Germany in 2012, his latest book, The Failure Of Laissez Faire Capitalism And Economic Dissolution Of The West, is now available in the U.S. as an eBook.

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Hedge Hogs: The Cowboy Traders Behind Wall Street’s Largest Hedge Fund Disaster: The Barbara Dreyfuss book is the fast moving and riveting account of Amaranth Advisors LLC, the hedge fund that went from holding $9.668 billion in client assets in August 2006 to flaming out in losses exceeding $6 billion in less than four weeks; the culprit – out of control energy trading and efforts to rig the market according to the government.

Ayn Rand Nation: The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul, removes the propaganda mask that has been so adroitly affixed to Alan Greenspan’s page-boy coiffed goddess of laissez-faire capitalism and the Tea Party’s mother ship. The book is written by Gary Weiss, long time Wall Street reporter and author, and released by St. Martin’s Press.Two years before the financial crisis, Weiss sounded the alarm in Wall Street Versus America – a must read for anyone serious about putting the pieces together.

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Bull by the Horns: Sheila Bair, the ultimate insider as former head of the FDIC during the financial crisis, has performed a microscopic job on former Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, in her book, Bull by the Horns. The image that emerges is a two-headed monster: a regulator functioning as a Citigroup messenger boy and an insanely mismanaged bank that was somehow able to shield from public scrutiny the fact that it had a measly $125 billion in U.S. insured deposits while turning government on its head and raking in over $2.5 trillion in taxpayer capital, guarantees and loans.

Neil Fabricant, president emeritus of the George Washington University Graduate School of Political Management and lifetime New Yorker, has penned a take-your-breath-away expose on the heretofore inscrutable Mayor of New York City, Michael Bloomberg. Mike! Wall Street’s Mayor, issharp, witty, and pulls no punches when it comes to the billionaire 1 percenter out to portray himself as the man of the people, while growing his estimated $3 billion personal wealth to $22 billion while in office.

There are dozens of writers in America who were highly skeptical of candidate Obama’s inexplicable, cult-like rise to the top of the Democratic party. Their work is bound together in Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion, edited by Jeffrey St. Clair and Joshua Frank. (An article by Pam Martens, Editor of this web site, Obama’s Money Cartel, is included in the anthology.)